In 1868 the Vienna-born Hungarian writer and human rights campaigner Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the term ‘Homosexualisten’ in a private letter to the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The following year he used the word in two pamphlets denouncing Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code, which made sexual contact between members of the same sex punishable by up to four years in prison. It is the first recorded public reference to ‘homosexuality’ and last year Wrightwood 659 in Chicago took it as the starting point for an exhibition that explored how artists depicted gay people or expressed queer sensibilities until the outbreak of the Second World War. A version of that show is now opening at the Kunstmuseum Basel (7 March–2 August). European works – including Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s drawing The Laundress (1879), widely considered the first Western depiction of a male couple – are to the fore, but the curators also take in developments in Japan, Peru, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.
Find out more from Kunstmuseum Basel’s website.
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